it takes a village
by hulklinging
Summary: Billy Shepherd and Tommy Kaplan turn out a little different.
1. Chapter 1

Thomas Kaplan grows up in a family that loves him, a family he doesn't have to fight for space in. He gets screened for ADHD at a pretty young age, gets put into classes with teachers that know how to handle that, who are patient and who see the potential in him.

He doesn't blow up a school. He thrives. He has a bit of trouble keeping friends, but that ends up fitting with the attitude he cultivates by the time he gets to high school. He's got a few close friends, but his inability to really keep his mouth shut in the face of bullshit means he's not the most popular kid around. He likes to get into fights because it's a way to not be bored (because it's a way to stand up for kids without coming off as some good doer).

His powers show up in the middle of a gym class. The speed, that is. Suddenly his social schedule is a lot emptier, but the running is worth it. He explores the city in bursts of speed that dazzle him, leave him laughing. The explosions come later, luckily somewhere a little less public ("Sorry about my phone, mom. I must have dropped it somewhere").

When Iron Lad comes calling, he has to fight back the excitement. He's no fanboy, but who doesn't want to be a superhero, secretly? He doesn't need to think about it. He says yes immediately.

He loves it. He argues with Eli and teases Teddy and only whines a little at having to take on Mercury as a codename. He gets the whole 'mirroring the avengers' thing but Quicksilver doesn't really fit their theme anyway so why does he have to go with such a lame codename?

"And who are you? Speed?" sneers the the girl in the cathedral.

He smirks. "Yes."

* * *

Billy Shepherd struggles.

He's a quiet child. It's a learned behaviour. Being quiet is best. He learns that his parents don't take well to being interrupted. So he learns to read young and borrows books from the library by the backpack-load. Matilda is a favourite. She gets a special place on his shelf, a battered copy he finds for 25 cents at a garage sale.

Comics come later. He remembers the first time he sees the Avengers on TV. All he can do is stare. They fly around and help people! That's amazing! They don't help everyone, though. This is a lesson that hurts.

He doesn't make friends easily, weird as he is. Always cutting himself off just as he's about to speak. He hates school, likes the knowledge but struggles with the classes, and the elbows in the hallways don't help. He keeps his head down, swallows his words. Lets his comics grow dust, under his bed. He doesn't believe in heroes anymore. Not the ones with capes, at least. Matilda had to rescue herself, and Ms. Honey too.

He starts getting headaches. They're painful, but the worst part of them is that he swears he can see things moving out of the corners of his eyes.

He overheard his parents one night, his mother confessing that she thinks there's something wrong with him.

"If he turns out to be a fag, I wouldn't be surprised," spits his father.

Billy's stomach clenches. He thinks about how his eyes linger on the frames of his classmates, skipping over the curves of the girls, catching on the planes of the boys. It feels dangerous. Just like his voice, he does his best to swallow it down.

The day Billy gets caught kissing a classmate is the first time his dad hits him. He looks as shocked as Billy feels, but there's no apology. Billy feels off balance. He knew his father hated things about him, but he never bothered to tally up all the pieces. He hadn't realized that everything his father hated about him added up to a whole. Every piece of him.

That's also the night that Billy catches the things moving at the edges of his vision, and realizes that it's him doing the moving. He sends various books and school supplies flying around the room, awash in blue fire. He smiles, and everything tumbles down again.

He doesn't talk about it. Not the boys. Not the powers. He hardly says a word for almost a year. Not talking doesn't stop the hate in the halls and his home. In fact, it seems to make people even angrier. Billy rides out the bruises and feels something in him hollowing out. With every hit, the emptiness grows.

There's nothing special about the day where everything changes. He can't remember what he does to make his father shove him, but he hits the wall behind him and something explodes behind his eyelids.

"Stop," he says.

He does.

Everything does. The clocks stop. The power goes out. His father is frozen a few feet from him, his mother over by the table has stopped breathing.

The phone doesn't have a dial tone, but he mutters 'please' and is able to call 911.

"Something's happened." His voice sounds strange. Hoarse. Unknown. "Send help."

They are reluctant to call it murder. His parents aren't technically dead. They just haven't found a way to make them start breathing again. The police are relieved when a juvenile detention faculty offers to take him. The have experience with cases like this, after all.

Billy doesn't open his mouth for any of it.


	2. Chapter 2

Billy does not know much about juvenile detention faculties.

But this one matches too closely with all the dystopia stories he's consumed to be a proper one. He figures that out pretty quick, between the cages and the cold lab tables.

He doesn't bother raising a fuss. He's still too scared to open his mouth, worried about the weight of the words growing there. He grits his teeth until his jaw aches, but he doesn't even let himself scream.

The doctors are all very impressed by that.

The others there don't like him. In here, to hate someone for a power that may or may not dwell under one's skin would be hypocritical. But they're teenagers, so they always find something.

Billy's voice betrays him in more ways than one, he knew that even before the headaches started. So he doesn't speak around his fellow detainees. It doesn't help. They grab at what they can, twist it to their own liking. They strip Billy bare without him even looking, pick at what's left of his hollowed out insides. His lack of a voice is to hide a certain inflection, but they have his number anyone, these brutes with big muscles that Billy once found his eyes lingering on but now he watches out of fear. They pick at his slim form (because it's better for the doctors if he's not strong), how he always hides in the communal showers (because not all the bruises have faded yet, and to bruise is to bleed is to be a target), how he probably spends the most time with the doctors out of some perverted need.

One of them, some kid with a god complex and what might be super-strength, whispers from next door what he thinks Billy gets up to when he comes back after lights out, stumbling and barely conscious. Billy wants to say that it's Graham who's spending time thinking about these scenarios, but he bites his tongue instead.

It doesn't matter if the bruises fade. Soon enough, new ones take their place.

Graham is to blame for just as many as the experiments. Where the doctors leave clear straight lines across his chest, wrists, ankles, Graham aims for the ribs, his hands, and once when Billy swears he smelled of alcohol and who let this guy have some of that, he grabbed him by the neck and promised to be the end of him, one of these days.

There's blocks on their powers here, but it hardly makes a difference. Graham is twice Billy's size.

There are blocks on their powers here, so when they open the doors of the cells one day and Graham doesn't get up, stays crumpled in a corner of his cell, bloody and bruised and unmistakably diseased, well. It must have been the boy's own doing. It looks like he beat his head against the wall until he died. A terrible tragedy, but nothing to investigate.

Billy chews on his lip and thinks about how Graham had taken to muttering in detail how he was going to kill Billy, just loud enough for him to hear. Billy thinks about muttering 'Run', and the surprised grunt Graham had made before standing up, running at the bars again and again and again until finally he stopped.

He should feel bad. He should.

He can't bring himself to.

After that, there is little to mark the days. Nothing changes.

Until the sound of an explosion wracks the facility, and there's suddenly a huge hole where his door was. His hands come up, and blue blazes in a shield that is gone again so quickly he's not sure it was actually there.

Through the hole comes his salvation, dressed up like it's Halloween, speaking stories faster than he can follow. A boy that feels familiar, even as he vibrates too much to get a good look at his face. A girl and a robot, too. The girl won't stop staring at him, like she wants to say something but she's not sure how. He knows he looks at least as bad as he feels, so he doesn't blame her.

"We'retheYoungAvengers," says the boy. "We'reheretorescueyou."

What with the robot and everything, a Star Wars reference is halfway out of his mouth before he remembers he shouldn't talk. He bites it back, and turns to freeze the guards coming up on them instead. He doesn't say a word, just looks at them and shoves, and they light up blue but are still groaning when the blue has faded, so it looks like as long as he doesn't talk, he doesn't kill. He can do that.

He's not sure he can be the hero this team seems to need him to be, but they're offering a way out, so he won't refuse either. The robot already seems to know his name ("William Shepherd?") so he doesn't need to say anything at all. He feels questions well up inside of him, more words bubbling in him than he's felt in ages, but he lets them sit.

The girl who came to his door is still staring. When he catches her at it, she blushes but doesn't back down.

"You and Tommy could be twins," she notes. "You look so similar. Aside from the hair, you're practically interchangeable."

The statement is too kind. Tommy's got that kind of lean muscle that Billy's always been envious of, that sort of build that looks effortless but still strong. But Billy can see where she's coming from. It's the reason the boy looked familiar off the bat. It's because he recognized his face from the mirror.

Tommy has no patience for the conversation. Billy has hardly known him fifteen minutes, but would bet he hardly has the patience for most things.

"He can be Doctor Doom's lost brother, for all I care. Are you going to help us get Teddy back?"

He has no idea who Teddy is. But he nods, because Cassie seems kind and the robot knows his name and Tommy has his face. The other girl is watching him (Kate, and the other boy Eli, and if they're superheroes shouldn't they be using codenames?), and she watches him nod or shake his head and catches on quick.

"Can you speak?"

He shakes his head.

"But you can hear us?"

A nod.

Eli rolls his eyes and tosses him a little pad of paper and a pencil.

"I hate charades."

Despite his tone, it's a kindness. One more personal than busting him out of juvie because his name was on some list. Billy clutches the little notebook and writes _'thank you'_ on the first page. Eli's smile is tight but genuine.

 _Do you know where your friend is?_ he asks.

"No." Cassie curls up on herself, and Billy can't tell if she's actually smaller or if it's just a trick of the light. "Vision's working on that."

Billy thinks about how the doctors caught on that he knew his parents were still at the hospital without being told, how they tested his reach.

 _Does anyone have a photo of him?_

He's beautiful, is the first thing Billy thinks, and immediately flinches at the thought, because it's thoughts like that that lead to elbows in the stomach, that mean more whispering at night, 'if he turns out to be a fag...' He closes his eyes and reaches out, finds the boy and writes down his location all without looking at the photo again. Boys that look like that mean nothing but danger for Billy. He knows this. All this Teddy is now is someone to save, and then maybe they'll let him go, and he'll be free to... He's not sure what he'll do. He doesn't know how to have time for himself anymore. He's not sure how to make his own choices.

He can deal with that later.

It's not long before their transportation is slowing, the others gearing up and standing by the door. Billy feels ridiculously underdressed in his white uniform, strangely similar to all those nightmares that haunt kids when they're younger, showing up at school in their pyjamas or something similar. Still, he moves to follow them, a blue shield flickering around them as they storm in. He tucks himself out of the way as his new allies attack the Skrull(!) that has their friend captive. He still somehow ends up face to face with the boy for a moment.

"Tommy?" says the boy. His voice is nice too, rich and comfortable, its cadence fitting perfectly with every other part of him. Billy just shakes his head, tucks himself against the side of the Skrull's ship and as far from this Teddy as he can get. Teddy's soft mouth twists into a frown, but then he's turning to greet his team, and for a moment it's all hugs and happy reunions and Billy really would like to leave now but there are Kree trying to get through his force field.

There's conversation, then guns firing, and his force field falters and breaks apart, and then it is all he can do to protect himself. His head is swimming, and he might be losing his time, because he blinks and the Avengers are there, and then there's more fighting, and he doubts that anyone would notice if he slipped away now but Tommy has a bad habit of leaving his back uncovered and Cassie's such a big target, so he stays.

He's not quick enough to stop the bullet aimed at Captain America. That's okay. There's an actual hero who is.

When the teams head to the hospital, he makes his exit. It's a big city, and it's easy enough for Billy Shepherd to disappear into it.


End file.
